Grey zone

OVER the months Yuichi Okano realised that his elderly mother was losing her mind. She stopped bathing and started to smell. At night she chatted to her late husband. She would head out of the front door and disappear, with Mr Okano left to pound the streets of Nagasaki, plotting her meandering course with the help of neighbours. What he feared most was not noticing her sitting outside in the dark as he parked the family car.

Last year over 10,000 dementia sufferers went missing in Japan. Many turned up dead, or not at all. Some walked into the paths of trains, for which their families may suffer a posthumous indignity: a bill for the cost of the accident. One man who lost his father this way recalls staring in disbelief at a carefully itemised invoice from the railway company for ¥7.2m ($65,215). Late settlements accrue interest.